After Germany's largest Internet providers agreed to voluntarily block pirate sites earlier this year, the DNS resolver Quad9 appealed the blocking order of the Hamburg district court. As TorrentFreak reported, these blocks are built in at the DNS level, though DNS blocking is easy to bypass by moving to Cloudflare, OpenDNS, Quad9, or some other DNS resolver not used by your ISP. Since this solution is widely known by copyright holders, Sony Music has obtained a court order requiring Quad9 to block a popular pirate site. Although the target site was not mentioned in the court order issued by the Hamburg District Court, Canna.to is probably the site as it is already part of the voluntary blocking pact of German Internet access providers.
Quad9's call
The non-profit foundation Quad9 recently filed an appeal in front of the Hamburg district court in an attempt to cancel the blocking demands. Although the foundation does not condone piracy, it thinks using third-party intercessors to prevent users from accessing content online is a step too far. At the same time, Quad9 claims that Sony Music could track down the site's operator, go after its web hosting provider, or go after its domain registrar. In a weblog post announcing its appeal, Quad9 explained that browsers, antivirus software, firewalls, and even VPN services could all be targeted, stating: “This case is not just about recursive DNS resolvers and their users: Any service or software that can monitor and also influence any part of an Internet transaction between an end user and any content source should be harmed by the result. Web browsers, antivirus software, firewalls, spam filters, email clients, VPN providers, and many other middleware components and middleware too abundant to count are implicated as possible next targets because their situations are wildly akin to those of recursive DNS dispatchers. in information flow diagrams. We'll have to wait and see if Quad9 gets your call, but in the meantime, the DNS resolver has set up a temporary order compliance hack that lets you limit blocking measures to German IP addresses. Via TorrentFreak